If I keep posting like this, this blog might be worth reading…

Alright so

Sympaturgy

I was thinking the other day about magic, In Game. And I generally dislike the way D&D does magic. I like a more then-and-there approach, kind of like sorcerers are in D&D but even more so. I also have become drawn into the Dresden Files books, and I really dig the way magic works in there.

Harry Dresden sometimes uses a type of magic called Thaumaturgy. In his world, thaumaturgy is magic done to a little thing that affects a big thing. The little thing, though, has to be similar to the big thing, and has to have a piece of the big one. One time he soaks a Snoopy doll with werewolf blood so he can affect the werewolf. Kind of like a Voo-Doo doll, but with other applications, you could use a piece of a tree to scry the area around that tree.

The only problem I have with it is Thaumaturgy means ‘miracles’ in the dictionary. And since there is no Divine magic in Cobweb, I find the connotation less than desirable.

Now some dude, who I can’t remember, wrote a bunch of stuff on how societies evolve and he identified a thing he named Sympathetic Magic, which is described exactly how Thaumaturgy is described in the Dresden Files. So I decided to call the type of magic in ‘Cobweb’: Sympaturgy.

There will obviously be other types of magic, but if you a casting a spell on someone, and you have some hair or fingernails to use as a Sympatugic Link, you won’t have to use quite so much Mettle.